Pope Francis: “Being Homosexual Isn’t a Crime.”
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Ah, so wanting companionship and intimacy-- or, you know, falling in love-- are not the right motivation. And you know it'll lead to misery, even though it demonstrably doesn't in billions of cases, because you know these people better than they know themselves.
I do indeed see people pursuing vain and shallow relationships-- including those who have kids, just as often. What I don't do is exhibit such universal loathing that I use those instances to tar an entire species.
There was a woman absolutely smashed off her tits running around the Co-op with a baby in a pram last night trying to get away from the staff who were trying to eject her. Her partner (let's say husband, I have no idea) just stood there, also way way way off his tits, roaring 'Come ooooooooon' to no one in particular, mostly the ceiling. Enough said I think.
You're insisting that everyone who wants a relationship, companionship and intimacy, but isn't pursuing the specific purpose your Church envisages for them, is just imitating your own conception of marriage and on the road to misery. The drivel you've come out with in this thread alone-- "shallow imitation", in defence of a letter calling billions of happy relationships an "intrinsic moral evil"-- is some of the most condescending, arrogant, and misanthropic stuff I've read on here.
Something doesn't cease being hateful just because you call it love. You're still preaching the illegitimacy and "evil" of any loving relationship that doesn't fit your mould. And that's hate.
Wanting people to be happy is not hate. I want you to be happy. I think most of you are actively advocating for things that make people unhappy (the brief bit about pot in particular), but I'm not pretending you're doing so out of hate. I think you're misguided, you think I want to cause people pain.
You're insisting that everyone who wants a relationship, companionship and intimacy, but isn't pursuing the specific purpose your Church envisages for them, is just imitating your own conception of marriage and on the road to misery. The drivel you've come out with in this thread alone-- "shallow imitation", in defence of a letter calling billions of happy relationships an "intrinsic moral evil"-- is some of the most condescending, arrogant, and misanthropic stuff I've read on here.
Something doesn't cease being hateful just because you call it love. You're still preaching the illegitimacy and "evil" of any loving relationship that doesn't fit your mould. And that's hate.
If you believe relationships without children always make people unhappy, and that enforced solitude (under penalty of censure from the Church) always makes people happy, and that this one-size-fits-all proscription is so solid as to be applied to the species as a whole, you're absolutely hopelessly deluded. That would be one of the most extreme positions I've ever heard, and a complete rejection of billions of lived experiences.
Not to mention of course that "evil"-- the term the letter used-- is rather a far cry from "misguided".
Edit: for what it's worth, no, I don't think you want to "cause people pain". I think a book (and a religious authority) has told you how people should act, and you're so committed to the belief structures surround them that you cannot conceive that those rules might not work for literally everybody. In that pursuit you've chosen to dismiss or disbelieve what other people tell you about their own experiences, because they don't match what the book (and religious authority) tells you should happen.
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And you, in all your magnanimous wisdom, have decided what would make all the various peoples of the world happy, and that is of course to live how you do.
Ah, the Christian concept of love. One of the many reasons I became an atheist.
Imagine telling someone with an obvious physical disability that nothing in the world can take mobility away from them..
I take more responsibility for managing my emotions than you ever will, because it's a lot harder for me than it is for you. It doesn't always seem that way because I've been unmedicated most of my life, and that meant I had to get very good at controlling my emotions because otherwise noone would like me. But it still requires work. I have to plan my life around the times when I will have emotional regulation, when I will be able to actually feel emotions like happiness instead of the undifferentiated, painful intensity that I feel most of the rest of the time if I don't constantly, constantly distract myself.
As long as I have very small amounts of amphetamines in my system, yes.
Otherwise, my brain tends to do its own thing, and it prefers being suicidal to being bored, and the list of things it isn't bored by is extremely short.
You are correct in a sense though, I am very fortunate to have cultivated a relatively clear understanding of the limits of my self-control. I can't imagine how exhausting it must be to feel personally responsible for every thought and emotion that crosses your mind, or every momentary impulse, desire or impression.
It's also ironic, isn't it. You like to believe you're somehow too evolved and mature for our rigid concepts of identity, yet here I am having to explain something that should be completely obvious to anyone questioning the validity of identity; that that thing you think is yourself, the thing you think is in control, is actually just a very, very small part of what you actually are.
If you want those things, then they matter. Pretending they don't isn't joy, it's denial.
It's very admirable to understand the difference between what truly makes you happy and what you want in the moment, but that's not the same as pretending not to want anything at all. Because sure, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, sex, money, drugs and so forth may not really matter, but we don't live in the grand scheme of things, we live in the now. The now is all we have, and in a very real sense the only form of happiness we will ever get in this life is a happy now.
Shit, can you tell I have ADHD yet?
Name some.
The fact that you imagine any of this is me looking down on myself is honestly quite revealing.
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- Feb 7, 2011
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Those religions, philosophers, and psychologists had no idea how brain chemistry works and that happiness is just a chemical in your brain.
An awful lot of chemicals, technically. Happiness could be viewed as a composite of multiple things with multiple pathways involving almost the whole kit and kaboodle: 5-HT (serotonin), noradrenaline, dopamine, glutamate, GABA, BDNF, cortisol, and many, many others.
Also, I'd have to point out that I'm not sure all the chemicals in the world will do you much you good if your life is resoundingly shit, because if your brain chemicals are out of alignment, it's usually as a reaction to what you experience and feel.
That's actually a major problem with psychiatry these days: if your anxiety is caused by struggling to pay the rent, pills don't do a whole hell of a lot
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And twice is the only way to live.
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My impression, beyond that, is that psychiatry often tends to "individualize" issues that are mostly social, cultural, political. They make it a "you" problem (learn to cope with it, the suffering is in your brain, take a pill and tell yourself the story that makes you feel better, solve "yourself") instead of facing the "us" problem (how we collectively build the conditions of that suffering, how we should solve our society). In that sense, it's the science of the neocapitalist world. The most status-quo preserving, individualist approach to mental suffering.
It's not so much a problem with psychiatry, but society. The healthcare profession can't do much more than mitigate the symptoms.
I don't particularly agree with this.
The biopsychosocial model is well understood, but psychiatrists and psychologists can't decide government policy and fix social, cultural and poltical problems. Healthcare professionals have can do little more than take patients as individuals and try to do what they can for them. The same applies to a load of physical illnesses, too: diabetes, asthma and more are all conditions that tend to have underlying socioeconomic causes, but from the perspective of healthcare just have to be treated as they come.
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Sure, but on the other hand, you could have everything going for you in life and still be miserable enough to kill yourself. Let us not forget that Anthony Bourdain, a rich, famous, successful, handsome man, who women loved, and who had the best possible job (travel the world and eat awesome food) hanged himself. It goes to show that no matter how good your life is, if the little chemicals in your brain aren't cooperating you're fucked.
Well, about a quarter of cases of unipolar depression are genetic - people prone to depressive episodes without any apparent triggers. That's certainly a thing.
However - and here I would advocate for psychology - what happens if a person without a mental health disorder doesn't understand what makes him or her happy? By which I mean we learn to some degree from our parents, society, etc. what they think is supposed to make us happy. That belief lodges in some people rather than their own inner truth, and so drives them to actions which will never ultimately satisfy them.
So imagine a man is filled with the idea that wealth will make him happy. If he gets a pay raise, it will create a sense of pleasure, because there is still some satisfaction to be experienced fulfilling what he thinks he is supposed to do, so it appears true that wealth will make him happy. But it will be superficial and transient, so he will try to get another pay raise, and another, and yet none of these pay raises will ever fill the hole he feels inside, because he's fundamentally trying to find inner peace in the wrong way for himself. What he actually needs is to self-search to find what he really needs. Maybe he'll realise on his own at some point, but he might also need, or do better, with therapy.
I can't help but note that at some elite schools there are reports of lots of students with mental health issues. They are driven into intense competition and pressure to achieve, such that kids come out with amazing grades and yet are absolutely miserable, and often suffer some sort of collapse on the way or later. Was that success worth it? Do mummy and daddy feel proud about wrecking their child's personal wellbeing because they thought straight As were more important?